“To manage a school filled with six hundred little animals,” the old member of the board told the sobbing young headmaster, “you need an ogre now and then.”

Two months after his arrival at St. Alfonso’s, Father Mendonza summoned Mr. D’Mello over to his office one morning. He told Mr. D’Mello that he had no option but to ask him to serve as the assistant headmaster. To handle a school like this, the Jesuit declared, he needed a man like Mr. D’Mello.

Stop for a moment, D’Mello told himself. Catch your breath. He was about to go into the classroom-about to declare war. The plan had worked well so far; he had come the way of the rear entrance. A surprise attack. He had figured that the news of Mendonza’s change of mind on Angel Talkies was by now common knowledge. The boys had of course construed it as cowardice on the part of the school authorities. The danger was highest now, but also the opportunity to teach them a lasting lesson.

The class was quiet-too quiet.

D’Mello went in on tiptoe. The last row, where the tall, overdeveloped boys sat, were clumped together, a soundless knot around a magazine. D’Mello hovered over the boys. The magazine was the usual kind of magazine. “Julian,” he said gently.

The boys turned around, and the magazine dropped to the floor. Julian stood up with a grin. He was the tallest of the tall, the most overdeveloped of the overdeveloped. An inverted triangle of chest hair jutted out of his open shirt already, and when he rolled up a sleeve and made a muscle, D’Mello could see his biceps swelling into pale, thick tubers. As the son of a coffee-planting dynasty, Julian d’Essa could never be expelled from the school. But he could be punished. The little demon looked up at D’Mello, with a lecherous grin pasted on his face. In his mind Mr. D’Mello heard d’Essa’s voice; it goaded him on to do his worst: Ogre! Ogre! Ogre!

He heaved the boy out of the seat by his collar. Rip-the collar came off the shirt. D’Mello’s shaking elbow straightened out-it connected with the side of the boy’s face.

“Get out of the class, you animal…and kneel down…”

After shoving Julian out of the class, he put his hands on his knees and caught his breath. He picked up the magazine and flipped its pages about for public view.

“So this is the sort of thing you boys want to read, huh? Now you want to go to Angel Talkies? You think you’ll see the posters on the wall: those Murals of Sin?”

He walked around the class with his shaking elbow and thundered: Even the lechers were ashamed to go into Angel Talkies. They covered themselves in blankets and pushed rupee notes shamefully to the desk attendants. Inside, the walls of the theater were papered with posters of X-rated films, purveyors of every known depravity. To see a movie in such a theater was a corruption of body and soul alike.

He hurled the magazine against a wall. Did they think he was frightened to beat them? No! He was not one of these “new-fashioned” teachers trained in Bangalore or Bombay! Violence was his staple, and his dessert. Spare the rod, and spoil the child.

He collapsed onto his chair. He was horribly out of breath. A dull pain spread its roots across his chest. He saw with satisfaction that his speech had had some effect. The boys were sitting without a squeak. The sight of Julian with his torn collar kneeling outside the class had a quieting effect. But Mr. D’Mello knew it was just a matter of time, just a matter of time. At the age of fifty-seven he had no more illusions about human nature. Lust would inflame the boys’ hearts with rebellion again.

He ordered them to open the Hindi textbooks. Page 168.

“Who will read the poem?”

The class was silent around one raised arm.

“Girish Rai, read.”

A boy wearing comically large spectacles got to his feet from the first bench. His hair was thick and parted down the middle; his small face was overpowered by pimples. He did not need the textbook, for he knew the poem by heart:

Nay, Said the Flower

Cast me, said the flower,

Not on the virgin’s bed

Nor in the bridal carriage

Nor in the merry village square.

Nay, said the flower,

Cast me but on that lonely path

Where the heroes walk

For their nation to die.

The boy sat down. The entire class was silent, humbled for a moment by the purity of his enunciation in Hindi, that alien language. “If only all of you could be like this boy,” Mr. D’Mello said quietly.

But he had not forgotten that his favorite had let him down in the Rotary competition. Ordering the class to copy out the poem six times in their notebooks, he ignored Girish for two or three minutes. Then he summoned him with his fingers.

“Girish…” His voice faltered. “Girish…why didn’t you get first prize in the Rotary competition? How will we ever get to Delhi unless you win more first prizes?”

“Sorry, sir…” the boy said. He hung his head in shame.

“Girish…lately you haven’t been winning so many first prizes…Is something the matter?”

There was a worried look on the boy’s face. Mr. D’Mello panicked.

“Is someone troubling you? One of the boys? Has d’Essa threatened you?”

“No, sir.”

He looked at the tall boys in the back row. He turned to his right and glanced at the kneeling d’Essa, who was grinning hard. The assistant headmaster came to a quick decision.

“Girish…tomorrow…I don’t want you to go to Angel Talkies. I want you to go to the Belmore Theater.”

“Why, sir?”

Mr. D’Mello recoiled.

“What do you mean, why? Because I say so, that’s why!” he yelled. The class looked at them; had Mr. D’Mello raised his voice to his favorite?

Girish Rai reddened. He seemed on the verge of tears, and Mr. D’Mello’s heart melted. He smiled and patted the small boy on the back.

“Now, now, Girish, don’t cry…I don’t care about the other boys. They’ve been to the talkies many times-they’ve read magazines. There isn’t anything left to be corrupted. But not you. I won’t let you go there. Go to Belmore.”

Girish nodded, and went back to his seat in the front bench. He was still on the verge of tears. Mr. D’Mello felt his heart melting out of pity; he had been too harsh on the poor boy.

When the class ended, he went up to the front bench and tapped on the desk: “Girish-do you have any plans for this evening?”

What a terrible day, what a terrible day. Mr. D’Mello was walking along the mud road that led from the school to his home in the teacher’s colony. That awful whack of the stone echoed over and over again in his head…the look in the poor animal’s eyes…

He walked back with his poetry books beneath his armpit. His shirt was now speckled with red curry, and the tips of his collars were curled in, like sunburned leaves. Every few minutes, he stopped to straighten his aching back and catch his breath.

“Are you ill, sir?”

Mr. D’Mello turned around: Girish Rai, with a huge khaki schoolbag strapped to his back, was following him.

Teacher and pupil walked a few yards side by side, and then Mr. D’Mello stopped. “Do you see that, boy?” He pointed.

Halfway between the school and the teacher’s house ran a brick wall with a wide crack yawning down the middle. Both the wall and the crack had been there for years, in that road where no detail had significantly changed since Mr. D’Mello had moved to the neighborhood thirty years ago to take up the quarters assigned to him as a young teacher. Three lampposts along the adjacent road were visible through the crack in the wall, and for nearly twenty years now, Mr. D’Mello had stopped every evening and squinted hard at the three lampposts. For twenty years, he had been searching the lampposts for the explanation of a mystery. One morning, about two decades ago, while passing the crack he had seen a sentence in white chalk marked on all three lampposts: